


The Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes

by pendrecarc



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, First Time, No One Else Gets to Kill You
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2020-12-24 07:56:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21096044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: "For all the Web bound us together, I never actually met her. What was she like?"The newly-bound Agnes Montague pays a visit. The consequences are gradual but far-reaching.





	1. we'd like to know a little bit about you for our files

**Author's Note:**

  * For [May](https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/gifts).

_Oxford, ca. 1970_

Within a very particular realm of interest, the Institute’s library is the finest in the English language. Sometimes, when her investigations draw her outside that realm, Gertrude has to to go farther afield.

It's the greyest and wettest day January's inflicted so far, making travel even more tiresome than usual, but at least there's a ready welcome at the Bodleian when Gertrude arrives in Oxford. She prefers to do her reading in the Radcliffe Camera, whose name evokes lenses and apertures and whose iconic dome reminds her of a great unlidded eye staring up at the heavens. She looked into this once on a whim, but neither Sir Thomas Bodley himself nor John Radcliffe seem to have been predecessors of Jonah Magnus, and the architect long predeceased Robert Smirk. Whether or not there's a direct connection, her employer has a hand in most of Britain's institutions of higher learning, so there's never any fuss made over access to the collections.

She shakes the rain from her umbrella and hands the librarian her bibliography, and some hours later she’s deep in a seventeenth-century debate on the Library of Alexandria. It's been a quiet morning. Not just hushed in the way of libraries, but—as term hasn’t started, and the City Centre is blessedly clear of undergraduates—really, genuinely quiet, so she's startled by the sound of footsteps approaching. The hard floors and acoustics of that place make the tap of heels almost deafening. The scrape of a chair is even worse. Gertrude looks up from her work.

She’s never seen the young woman who slides into the desk opposite. She appears about Gertrude’s own age, if that, and has a long, very pale face framed by straight curtains of red hair. Like Gertrude's, her clothing is much too sober to be fashionable, but where Gertrude is in her customary uniform of herringbone tweed, cream silk, and a cardigan, this woman’s floppy-collared blouse and jacket are both a dull black, calculated to fade into the background. Which she might do, if she wasn’t staring at Gertrude with an intensity that makes her eyes seem lit from the inside.

Gertrude opens her mouth to ask if she can help her and chokes on a phantom pain that sears through her throat and lungs and gut. And then she understands.

Agnes Montague folds her long-boned hands on the desk and says, “You’re not what I expected.”

Gertrude clears her throat. “Bit of a risk, isn’t it, coming here of all places?”

“Why?” Her voice is light, her speech deliberate. “What are you going to do to me now?”

“I'm not going to do anything, but I thought you'd want to avoid close proximity to so much flammable material.” It’s in the quaint oath Gertrude had to take before she was first admitted here: _not to kindle therein, any fire or flame_.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve burnt anything down without meaning to.”

As most people manage to go their whole lives without burning anything down, Gertrude is tempted to remind her of the apartment block in Harrogate and point out that two years isn’t very long at all. But, on reflection, that may not have been an accident. Instead she says, somewhat at random, “What were you expecting?”

Agnes says nothing for a moment, and then she says, “I asked them to show me photos. You had much longer hair in all of them.”

Gertrude nearly laughs. Not just at the unexpectedness of this, but at the nerve it's touched; she was always rather proud of her waist-length hair. A harmless touch of vanity in someone who has very little time for such things. It all burned off six months ago, along with her eyebrows and lashes and everything else, in the ill-advised ritual that's led, she assumes, to the conversation she’s having now. The hair has grown back a bit curly but as unremarkable a brown as ever. There’s nothing about it that ought to hold Agnes’ attention, but she's staring at it as though it’s the most fascinating thing imaginable.

It’s—unsettling, being stared at like that. The irony of Gertrude’s discomfort isn’t lost on her. “I assume you’re here for a reason.”

“I live here,” Agnes says. Her eyes flicker back down. “You’re the one where she shouldn’t be. I could feel it this morning, that you were close. You were prickling all under my skin. I just had to follow it. Can’t you feel it, too?”

Gertrude hasn’t seen any photographs, but she has done her research. Knows less than she’d like about Agnes Montague, but more, no doubt, than her cult would like. She’s heard people describe what it’s like to be trapped under that gaze, the mesmerizing power of it, and she understands now what they mean —the bone-deep certainty of it, the resolve. “No,” she says, wishing she’d been allowed to carry in tea. Her mouth is suddenly dry. “I don’t feel a thing.” Then, at the slight change in Agnes’ expression: “Does that disappoint you?”

“You could feel it if you wanted,” Agnes says, rather than answer the question. “You haven’t opened yourself, not really. I thought you would have. I thought you would have _had_ to, to do what you did to me. But you haven’t given yourself over to the Eye at all, have you?”

Clothes burnt away, the scent of singed hair heavy in her nostrils, every inch of skin feeling like she’d held it to a hot iron. She lay there for hours on scorched earth until breathing wasn't an agony, and then she lay there a while longer until the rain started. Then she nearly died of exposure getting herself out of the Scottish Highlands. Gertrude has given herself over, certainly. She’s not sure yet to what. “You’re not here to tell me I should! Or are you here to evangelize for your own Power?”

Agnes shakes her head, sending auburn ripples over her shoulders. It’s not a ‘No’. “Once you’ve done it—I don’t know how to explain. You can’t understand until you let it in.”

Now Gertrude is the one feeling, obscurely, disappointed, because this isn’t new. It’s not so different, what she hears from the poor sods who come in to give their statements or threaten her with all manner of unspeakable fates, from the things she’s heard from polite and well-dressed people knocking on her door to hand her a tract or their holy book of choice. “You’re here to offer me peace, I suppose. The chance to follow some greater direction—”

“No,” Agnes says. Gertrude can’t look away from her face, but in her peripheral vision she can see Agnes has spread her hands flat against the desktop. “It’s not peace. It’s hunger.” The faint scent of burning wood teases at the edge of her senses. “All those statements, all those interviews, and you haven’t learned that? It’s always there—aching, no matter what I do—and I was so nearly ready to fill it. And then _you_—” Agnes lifts one hand, and it’s enough to draw Gertrude’s attention down. She sees the charred imprint of a palm and five fingertips, sees the hand reaching toward the book lying open between them, its pages dry as dust, centuries old and ready to go up in flame—

In what is not quite the stupidest thing she’s done recently, Gertrude shoots her hand out to close tight on Agnes’ wrist. Agnes freezes. Gertrude thinks she should relax her grip, should snatch her hand away, but instead she tightens her fist. And she doesn’t burn.

There’s heat, certainly. Her palm should be blistering. But it isn’t, and—it isn’t quite right to say it doesn’t hurt, but the pain is distant, manageable. And the air around them feels hot as an oven, but if it was, her glasses would have gone opaque with steam like they did when she stepped into the library. Instead she can see her whitened knuckles and the smooth skin of Agnes’ bare wrist with perfect clarity.

Agnes’ face, too—she looks shaken, young. Suddenly like the girl Gertrude herself has forgotten how to be. Gertrude wonders when someone last raised a hand to her in discipline or affection. She can’t imagine either coming easily to the scion of the Lightless Flame, either among her disciple-guardians or in her early years on Hilltop Road. She feels an odd stirring of pity in the middle of her panic.

She forces herself to appear calm, analytical. Cool. “That's quite enough,” she says. “You won’t find a new convert to your gospel here, but I think you already knew that. You and your Power have nothing I want. Go home, Agnes. Find someone else to destroy.” She makes herself let go, and then—which is much harder—turns her eyes back down to her book.

After a few moments, in which she can feel sweat trickling down her scalp and gathering under the arms of her silk blouse, she hears the chair sliding back again as Agnes leaves. Only when the sound of her heels has faded entirely does Gertrude let herself gasp and drop her forehead down onto the page.

When she sits back up her sweat has turned cold. She glances around quickly, just to make certain Agnes is gone. She’d like to think she’s capable of resuming the work she came here to do, but she’s far too shaken for that. She’ll sit here until she has her nerve back. Maybe have a sandwich and something strong to drink at that pub on the High just so Agnes doesn’t feel her disappear and know how badly she’s been rattled. Then she’ll take the next train back to London and the Institute.

And when she gets there, she might have a word about the Archives’ budget. She’s been meaning to point out it’s a waste of her time following down leads and confirming statements herself when there are more urgent matters to occupy her, and if Agnes Montague is still living in Oxford it would be as well to have someone else to send out on research. Gertrude knows certain people at the Institute were reluctant to trust the Archives to someone of her age and gender, but her results in the last year should speak for themselves. It’s high time she was given an assistant.


	2. look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes

_Kent, ca. 1996_

Gertrude has never been one for travel. Sometimes work makes it necessary, but it’s been years since she got any real enjoyment out of it. Even when the idea of holidays still had some appeal—before the thought of time away from her Archives began to seem more draining than restorative—the seaside would never have been her destination of choice.

Shivering on a slippery, sea-swept dock on the Kent coast, she has no regrets about forgoing holidays. She does regret not packing a warmer pair of socks this morning. That can’t be helped now, so she accepts Peter Lukas’ proffered hand and lets him help her onto the deck of his ship. She sits where she’s told and watches him fiddle with the sails and ropes, the proper names for which hover just on the edge of her mind. She lets them slip away. She’s been trying to cut back, and it would be rude to impose on her host. Besides, she thinks he would probably notice if she did, and she hasn't worked out yet whether that would be to her advantage.

“Mind the boom,” he says with a flash of that just-too-cheerful smile. Gertrude ducks obediently, and they cast off.

It’s a small one-man vessel, and once they’ve turned out into open water it begins to tip alarmingly with the waves. Lukas himself doesn’t seem alarmed, which Gertrude takes as a sign they aren’t about to capsize. He might be about to tip her overboard instead. The thought has occurred more than once since he appeared in the Archives the day before and invited her on this excursion. But if the new Head of the Institute wants her dead, there are more straightforward ways he could go about it. (Not for the first time, she thinks, _Elias Bouchard? What is the world coming to._) She tucks her hands into the elbows of her borrowed oilskin and narrows her eyes against the salt-spattered wind, trusting the Institute’s long alliance with the Lonely to carry her through whatever he has in mind. Soon all her energy is spent resisting her stomach’s objections to the constant pitching, and she doesn't have much time for worry.

It’s a bright, clear spring day, cold and lovely, and as she breathes carefully through her nose she realizes she’s barely been outside in months. The sunlight on her skin feels strange, exhilarating even through the nausea. It was a long, dark winter, and she’s slept in her office more nights the last month than she cares to admit. She wonders if she ought to reconsider the concept of holidays.

Maybe someplace warm.

An interminable stretch of sea and sunlight later, Lukas calls her name, and she looks up toward the prow where he’s beckoning to her. The gesture looks subtly wrong on him. She pushes herself upright and walks carefully along the deck, resisting the urge to grab at every convenient handhold along the way. This is not the place to show hesitation or weakness.

“And how have you enjoyed the journey?” he asks. His face is ruddy and clean-cut, his neat beard damp with salt spray.

“On balance, I think I prefer the train.”

Lukas laughs. “But you should feel honored, Gertrude. I don’t take passengers on the _Cantor_, except in very special circumstances. Which these certainly are.” He gestures out over the open water. They ship rolls in that direction, and as Gertrude finds herself staring down at the dark grey-green trough of a wave she gives up on appearances and grabs hold of the great metal ring in front of her.

Steadier, she raises her head and looks where he’s pointing, at an island a few hundred meters away. ‘Island’ is probably more than it deserves. It's a clump of rocks rising above the water, surf crashing over them, a few bare trees eking out a living at the highest point.

“What is this?”

“A way-station used by smugglers in the eighteenth century until my family came across it and decided it might be more useful for other things. The island isn’t what’s important to you, Gertrude. It’s what’s on it.”

He hands her a pair of binoculars, but she finds it difficult to negotiate them while staying upright. She considers again that idea of avoiding weakness, then discards it. She’s already off-balance. There’s no reason she has to be the only one. “Would you mind?” she asks, putting out a hand. She doesn’t look at him directly as he processes the request and slowly stretches out his arm. As she takes it, leaning on it a little more than she needs to, she wonders when he last had even this much human contact. She hopes his stomach is roiling as much as hers is.

_Priorities, Gertrude._ She manages the binoculars at last, honing in on the island, on the trees—and the figure standing between them, bowed as if in exhaustion.

On the long, dark red hair streaming in the wind.

“What is this,” she says again, this time in a very different tone.

“You know exactly who it is. If you’re not sure, look a little harder.”

He doesn’t mean the binoculars. Gertrude lets them drop, then takes off her glasses as well and strains her bare eyes and—_Sees_. Except it’s not images that come to her. It’s the sensation of burning in her veins, of the shock of cold and damp on her skin, of a gnawing hunger in her belly that will eat her alive if it can’t be fed—

She reels back, her grip on Lukas all that keeps her upright. When she gets her glasses back atop her nose, they're too wet to see through clearly. “How did you manage it?” she asks, when she can find her voice. It’s all she can do not to put true command in it. She wonders if would work, on him, out here.

“An opportunity presented itself,” he says, still cheerful. “I took advantage. I know you’ve been reluctant to move on her directly. I understand that, given your situation. But the Lightless Flame have no power out here. She’s already weakened. Soon there won’t be anything left. And then you, Gertrude, will have one less concern to occupy your valuable time.”

He’s right. She felt it just now; Agnes’ power is running thin and faint. It will take longer for her to die of exposure than it would for anyone entirely human, but loneliness and desolation aren’t the same thing, and the one can bring death to the other. Soon her blazing heat will be lukewarm, and then—

“Her disciples will be looking for her,” she points out. “They’re weakened, not entirely gone.”

He shrugs. “I expect them to look. They might even find her. I certainly don’t intend to stay around and make sure they don’t. That would defeat the purpose. But I don’t think they'll manage it.”

Lukas is probably right. He’s probably right, too, as he begins explaining what he hopes to gain from all this: not just weakening the Desolation, not just draining their power to his own benefit, but cementing his alliance with the Beholding. What he doesn't say outright is that it’s an impressive show of force, enough to remind Elias that he’d better keep his friends friendly.

He’s wrong, though, if he thinks this has put Gertrude in his debt.

While he turns them about, she goes back to her perch in the center of the deck. She keeps her eyes wide open on the return trip, barely blinking until they’re back in dock. They cross a long stretch of open ocean with nothing in sight. It’s far longer than it really ought to be, so close to the narrow Strait of Dover. But she watches that empty sea, drinking it all in.

Two days later she goes back to Kent and gets a room at a small seaside inn. Then she goes down to the local, orders the first thing she sees on the menu, and finds the man she wants.

He’s a fisherman about her father’s age, gruff and bearded. He owns a little sailboat that can be crewed by one. She buys him another round and he tells her where to find it, though afterward he won’t remember why he did. He begins to drink, and she watches him, and he tells her, without any words at all, how to sail it.

It’s another hour or two before she’s down at the dock. Her stomach’s already turning, but there's no time for it to settle. The weather is stirring, too, in ways her newfound knowledge tell her to mistrust. But the sea should be manageable, and she really can’t wait.

She knows she can’t wait because every time she reaches for the fire in her veins, it feels a little fainter. She’s started to worry it might die off entirely. 

Knowledge is one thing, will another, but physical ability is a separate matter entirely, and Gertrude has spent most of her forty-odd years at a desk. The waves begin to toss her more actively, the light drizzle turns to sheets of rain, and the dinghy fights her every time she hauls on a line or reaches for the tiller. She grits her teeth and presses on, clinging to the map that’s burned into her memory, the map without directions to a place that should not exist. She wouldn’t have a hope if there wasn’t still that flame burning too, on the edge of all her senses like a star too faint to see directly. She turns toward it and presses on.

She nearly finds the island by driving the dinghy straight onto the rocks. She draws on every scrap of experience she doesn’t actually have to save herself, tacks desperately into the wind, and once she’s put some breathing room between herself and the shoals she starts circling the little island, straining through the rain to find the dock that must be there. When she finds it at last she wages another lengthy battle to bring the dinghy up alongside and lash it as firmly as she can. She steps onto the pier and falls to her knees, shaking with cold and exhaustion. Not, she tells herself, with fear.

Gertrude limps up the rough-hewn steps cut into the rock and out onto the exposed face of the island. "Agnes!" Her voice is a harsh croak, and even she can barely hear it under the wind and the rain. She tries again. The second time, Agnes looks up.

She’s chained there, weighted down under heavy iron links that put Gertrude in mind of those eighteenth-century smugglers. Her hair doesn’t look red anymore, doesn’t look any color in particular. Her face, though, is stark white. And her eyes, when they’ve gained enough focus to fix on Gertrude and comprehend what they’re seeing—

Gertrude smiles thinly, briefly. Then she pulls the bolt-cutters from the rucksack under her arm.

She’s regretting every one of those years spent behind a desk by the time she has Agnes freed and has half-led, half-carried her down to the pier. Agnes slides down boneless to the deck the moment she’s inside, so Gertrude just lashes her to the nearest bollard and wraps her in another oilskin.

There isn’t breath for talking the whole way back, even if either of them was in a mood for conversation. She docks the dinghy exactly as she found it and guides Agnes back to the inn, where she dumps her still fully-clothed in a bath of scalding water and puts the kettle on. By the time Gertrude’s own tea is brewed and half-consumed Agnes is sitting upright of her own volition and beginning to peel herself out of her clothes. “Wait a moment,” says Gertrude, refilling the kettle.

Gertrude hisses and flinches from the water as she yanks the dress up and over Agnes’ head. The bath is even hotter now than when she filled the tub, which she supposes is a good sign. Gertrude lets Agnes deal with her own bra and panties and goes to fill a second mug with a teabag and a long splash of whisky, then pours the still-boiling water over it. Agnes snatches the mug from her hands and drinks greedily. There’s color coming back into her face now. It’s not the pink flush Gertrude’s cheeks must be showing, from leaning over the hot bath, but a deeper heat drawn from inside.

Agnes looks up at her at last. “Thank you.” It sounds polite but rote, the kind of ‘thank you’ you might offer when handed a cup of tea under any other circumstances.

“Think nothing of it.”

Agnes begins to laugh. She draws her knees into her chest and leans forward so Gertrude has to snatch the mug away to keep it from falling into the bath. She sets it down on the tile, and when she straightens again, Agnes takes Gertrude’s hand in both of her own and presses the palm to her parted lips.

Her breath feels like a brand. When Agnes lets her go, Gertrude expects to see a mark, but her skin is still rosy and whole.

“Why did you do it?” Agnes asks.

Gertrude considers the question. There are a number of answers she could give. “There is a certain school of thought,” she says at last, “that claims the Powers must be kept in careful balance, or they will all come tumbling down around us. If any one of them gains mastery over another, that balance is in jeopardy. It’s not a school of thought I follow, but I think it’s wise to remember its principles.”

“So you saved me to stop the Lonely from draining my god dry.” She sounds as skeptical as that suggestion deserves.

Gertrude makes an impatient noise. “For all I care, the Cult of the Lightless Flame could fall off the face of the earth tomorrow, and your ‘god’ could wink out into nonexistence. As I said, I’m not a strict adherent of the philosophy. But lightless or no, I want the cult where I can see them.” And she doesn’t particularly want the Lonely to gain the upper hand, with or without the tacit blessing of the Institute.

Agnes doesn’t seem to have taken offense. She just tilts her head sideways so one cheek is resting on top of her knees, and she blinks those great eyes up at Gertrude. She doesn’t look a day older than she did the first time they met. Gertrude is suddenly very conscious of the shape of her as it dips beneath the water, long limbs and the curve of her shoulders and the slight swell of her breasts under her crossed arms.

Gertrude gets to her feet, all her own limbs protesting the day’s work. “There’s no hurry to leave. I’ve reserved the room until tomorrow afternoon, if you want to stay here and recover. Or you can be off as soon as you’re dry.”

“Are you leaving?”

“On the first train tomorrow morning. For both our sakes, I'd strongly suggest you find a different one. For now, I’m going to bed.”

She closes the door to the bath and strips efficiently out of her own clothes. Everything she was wearing is still soaked through. She drapes her clothes over the radiator and slides under the covers of the twin bed nearest the window. She keeps her eyes closed as Agnes finishes in the bath, through the sounds of water running down the drain and long tangled hair being teased smooth again. Eventually she falls into a restless sleep. A distant corner of her mind is aware that half a kilometer away an aging fisherman is having the first of the nightmares that will plague him for the rest of his life.

She rises before Agnes the next morning and is pleased to find her clothing quite dry. She does note a slightly blackened patch on the leg of her wool trousers, which suggests this may not only be the work of the radiator. Agnes, in the next bed over, hasn’t moved. Gertrude dresses in silence and leaves without waking her.

Whatever ripples this unlikely rescue causes, Gertrude is insulated from them in the Archives. No doubt the Lukases are displeased that the sanctity of their remote hellhole has been violated. No doubt Peter suspects she had something to do with the quick extraction, as the Lightless Flame are not known for subtlety in their operations. But no accusations or reprisals come her way, so Gertrude goes back to planning rather less subtle operations. (After a recent near miss with the Hunt, she’s decided to err on the side of plastic explosives. Some matters are best not left to chance.)

Several days after returning from Kent, she runs into Elias Bouchard at the main doors of the Institute. He pauses to hold them open for her, and as she passes through she glances up to see the strangest expression on his face, not one she’d have expected from any past interaction with him. It's cool, curious, and strangely calculating. And she begins to wonder.


	3. koo-koo-ka-choo, Mrs. Robinson

_London, 23 November 2006_

Gertrude has been on sick leave for the better part of the week. She’s spent most of it lying on top of her duvet with earplugs inserted and a damp cloth over her eyes. Every time she stands, she feels faint and dizzy. She started the week hungry, but neither food nor drink has helped, so now she’s given up on both.

She knows exactly what she needs. She knows where she can get it. She refuses to break down and do what has to be done.

She’s sufficiently self-aware by now to know this is more a matter of pride than principle. Or, if it is principle, it’s that Gertrude is sufficiently conscious of her situation to avoid a dependence on any power, even the one she serves. She’s drained so many innocents of their terror and fed it back a hundredfold, and she knows she’ll have to do it again—but not yet. Not until she’s proved to herself she can do without. And then back to work.

Into the pounding of her temples breaks a pounding at the door, then a voice, muffled and unrecognizable through the earplugs. She sighs but doesn’t move. She’s given proper notice for her absence, and if Elias objects, he’s had other opportunities to say so. It might be Michael. The boy does worry. But surely he’d have tried her phone before stopping by her flat.

The pounding stops, and she’s just begun to hope whoever it is has given up when she begins to smell something odd, sharp and metallic. Smell is the one sense she hasn’t thought to mute. She sits up in bed, the cloth falling from her face, and sees the doorknob _glowing_ a brassy red. As she watches, the metal begins to sag.

She’s off the bed and halfway across the room before she can remember the state she’s in. Her knees sag under her, so she grabs at the coatrack near the door to keep her feet and tries to think. It’s been months since she moved against any of the Powers, and that was just a minor skirmish with the Flesh. If they wanted revenge, would it come now, like this? She glances back at the phone, discards the idea of calling for backup, and squares her shoulders. “Who is it?” she calls in her best mild, inquiring tones.

She can’t hear the response. Cursing her forgetfulness, she digs the earplugs out. “Sorry,” she says, taking a shaky step toward the door. “I didn’t quite catch that. My hearing isn’t what it used to be.”

A woman’s laugh comes from the other side of the door, just on the edge of hysterical. “Let me in, Gertrude.”

She doesn’t quite trust herself to place the voice. She puts a hand to the back of the door, as far from the knob as she can, and uncovers the peephole. Agnes Montague is standing in the corridor.

Gertrude considers the knob. The wood around it is starting to char and crack, and the metal is misshapen, still glowing with heat. Then she unbolts the lock above it and lets Agnes push the door open.

“This is unexpected,” she says. “Do come in.”

Agnes scarcely waits for her to step back and out of the way. She strides past her on those long legs and walks straight to the far end of the flat. It’s a large, single room with a galley kitchen in the far corner, a bed under the windows, and everything else covered in neat rows of books. Gertrude could do much better on her current salary, but she doesn’t need anything else. And it’s not as though she’s is in the habit of having guests. She forces the door closed, wondering if it’ll even be possible to get it open again once the metal has cooled, and throws the bolt shut.

She turns around, breathing through another wave of vertigo. “And to what do I owe—”

The words are stopped by Agnes’ mouth on hers.

There’s no finesse to it, not that Gertrude would have expected Agnes to have any. Just a bruising pressure of lips and then one hand at her elbow, the other at her cheek and jaw, holding her steady with a furious strength. And, inevitably, heat.

She sags in Agnes’ grip, her mouth falling away, and stares up at her in blank surprise. “Well,” Gertrude says when she can breathe again, “as retaliation goes, this is one of the more creative efforts I’ve seen.”

She might as well not have spoken. “I knew you would let me,” Agnes says, those magnetic eyes traveling up and down Gertrude’s face, pausing on her lips. Gertrude would like to protest that she’s _let_ her do nothing. “I knew you could take it, that you wouldn’t—” and then she’s kissing Gertrude again, and her hands are everywhere, singeing the wool and cotton covering her ribs and her hips, melting the small clasps holding her trousers up. Gertrude gasps, trying to pull the waistband away from her skin, and finds Agnes already there to do it for her, though with a very different end in mind. Her direct touch is searing. Gertrude is thinking of this in purely literal terms, of course: the heat of her blood, the burning of her skin. But as Agnes backs her stumbling towards the bed, she has to admit a figurative meaning, one that’s had no place in her life from the time she was old enough to understand it. Despite the heat surrounding her, her bared skin prickles with gooseflesh; untouched for all these years, it’s soft and too pale, the blue of her veins showing through. It’s wrinkled in places and not nearly as firm and strong on her bones as it once was. Agnes drags her mouth over each part of her like it’s a revelation.

_Oh, very well_, Gertrude thinks, letting herself tip backwards onto the bed, letting her hands bury themselves in soft auburn waves. The unexpected pain and pleasure of Agnes’ touch comes rushing in to fill the gaps left by her self-imposed withdrawal, and she drifts for a long time on the delirious edge until it’s all quite too much and she loses consciousness entirely.

She wakes to the darkness of a November evening. Agnes has turned the bedside lamp on, and the only source of light in the room bathes her bare skin in a golden glow. Her hair is tangled wine-dark over her shoulders. It’s hard not to think of her as young, for all Gertrude knows better. She stares straight up at the ceiling and doesn’t turn as Gertrude shifts sideways to look at her.

“Oh, good,” Agnes says. “I thought I might have killed you, after all.”

“Not your doing,” Gertrude says—then adds, drily, “at least not entirely. Are you going to tell me why you came here?” But now Agnes is looking back at her, and there’s unexpected understanding in her eyes.

“You’ve been denying it, haven’t you?” She reaches across the bed to tilt Gertrude’s face for better inspection. “I know that look. I’ve _worn_ that look. It’s not worth it. It’s just a delay.”

“I’m very well aware.”

“Then stop putting it off,” Agnes says. A smile pulls at one corner of her mouth, awkward and unfamiliar there. “If you want to know why I’m here, ask me.”

And Gertrude is just—so tired. She sighs and settles a little deeper into her pillow. Somewhere in the dark corners of her flat there is a slight click and a quiet whir. “If that’s what you want. Statement of Agnes Montague, recorded on—” She’s lost track.

“The 23rd November.”

“Recorded 23rd November, 2006. Statement regarding?”

“Regarding a boy she met in a coffee shop, and her own failed sacrifice.”

She lets herself drift on Agnes’ words, each of them making her a little stronger and a little more grounded. More deeply beholden.


	4. we'd like to help you learn to help yourself

_The Magnus Institute, undisclosed date, Spring 2015_

“Well, there it is,” Gertrude says. “I thought it would hurt—more.” She looks down at her blouse. There’s a small blotch of red near the shoulder. Then she looks up at Elias, who after everything is such a petty little man; he sees all, knows all, and he’s going to kill her with a _gun_? She’d laugh if she had breath for it.

She closes her eyes and waits for the next shot. It doesn’t come.

Instead she hears a gasp and a sickening, choked off cry, and she looks up again to see the mouth of the gun falling away, Elias’ mouth falling open. Someone’s grabbed onto his head from behind, a pair of hands seizing it in a vice-grip by the temples. The hair is curling, crisping; the skin across his forehead and cheeks turns red and cracks; and his eyes—

She watches Jonah Magnus’ eyes turn molten and run down the ruin of his borrowed face.

The grip on his head releases him, and he falls to the floor beside her, but Gertrude’s no longer interested in him. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she says, or tries to. It’s hard to get the words out.

“You’re lucky I did,” says Agnes, wiping her hands on her trousers. Young, beautiful Agnes. She’s done something different with her hair. None of which is particularly relevant. Gertrude wonders if fixation on minutiae is a symptom of catastrophic blood loss. “I’ve had barely a word in the last decade. Then, out of nowhere, a message saying you were about to raze the Institute to the ground. I might have been busy, you know.”

Gertrude snorts. It comes out as barely a huff. But she _can_ still breathe; this is encouraging.

“Or I might not have wanted to involve myself in the business of other Powers.” Agnes drops to a crouch and takes Gertrude firmly under the arms, raising her to a sitting position. “Why should I?”

“For the same reason I moved against the Lonely,” Gertrude says. “I’d made you my responsibility. And, like it or not, I seem to be yours.”

Agnes raises a skeptical eyebrow. She looks and sounds different, too, like she has been living more in the world. Perhaps the suggestion that she’d had other plans wasn’t so far-fetched after all. But she did come, and she proves it by leaning in and pressing their mouths together, laying claim.

Gertrude clutches at her shoulders to hold herself upright, then pushes her away. “Flattered as I am, there are more pressing concerns.”

Agnes sighs, glancing over at the tidy stacks of explosives that fill the bookshelves in Gertrude’s office. “You want to finish it?”

“That is rather the point.”

“And then what?” Those eyes, at least, haven’t changed at all. “Once this place is gone, what will you do? You don’t think the Eye will just let you walk away.”

“Not without a fight,” Gertrude admits. “But I’ve prepared for one.” In her medicine cabinet at home are a small vial of glass polish and an eyedropper.

Agnes shakes her head. “You won’t do it, whatever it is. You won’t let _yourself_ walk away. We both know what you can become, if you’ll only let it happen.”

“Convince me later. For now, help me up—I don’t know whether I can walk.” They get her good arm over Agnes’ shoulder, and then she’s on her feet. She might even be able to make it out of the Institute before the whole place goes up in flames. _Just a spark_, she’d told Elias. She looks at Agnes and allows herself a faint smile. “Would you care to do the honors?”


End file.
